New Rules for Social Media Optimization

There is an exceptionally interesting meme developing around the idea of social media optimization. It started with Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations and his 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO) and this insight:

“The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”

“SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren’t the only sites that drive big traffic anymore. While it’s not taking over SEO yet, it has the potential to someday soon.”

The ever insightful Loren Baker also gets in on the action and offers up, “Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO” and his additions: “Don‚Äôt forget your roots, be humble and don‚Äôt be afraid to try new things, stay fresh”.

What I would like to see added is:

14. Develop a SMO strategy – define your objectives and set goals. Be fully aware of what your desired outcome is as a result of performing these tactics. Reputation, sales, influence, credibility, charity, traffic/page views, etc.

15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely. Be cognizant of what actions will influence the desired outcome with the most impact.

According to Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum during the SES San Jose session “Marketing with Social Media“, 1% of those involved with social media are creating content, 10% will enrich that content and 90% will consume it. That’s a lot of influence wielded by content creators and those that reblog and mashup. Think about what you can do to enable content creation as well as the repurposing of that content for what might possibly be the most productive outcome.

16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices. As with good SEO, SMO tactics should become part of your organization’s best practices. Find ways to incorporate SMO tactics at the “template” level of document creation and as part of information distribution. Minor things like encouraging social bookmarks and rewarding incoming links as a standard practice across the organization can go a long way.

Regardless of the media, there is almost always going to be an “organic” and an “advertising” component. Think: SEO and PPC. Consider this session from the recent ad:tech conference in Chicago called “Advertising with Social Media“. It presented some interesting opportunities and challenges for advertisers regarding MySpace, YouTube and other social/consumer generated media. Advertisers recognize the reach of social media, but aren’t quite sure how to take advantage of it.

For reference, here is an aggregated list so far. Maybe we need a wiki for this?

Increase your linkability

Make tagging and bookmarking easy

Reward inbound links

Help your content travel

Encourage the mashup

Be a User Resource, even if it doesn‚Äôt help you

Reward helpful and valuable users

Participate

Know how to target your audience

Create content

Be real

Don’t forget your roots, be humble

Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh

Develop a SMO strategy

Choose your SMO tactics wisely

Make SMO part of your process and best practices

(15 votes, average: 3.27 out of 5)

Loading...

SUBSCRIBE TO TOPRANK'S TIPS NEWSLETTER

First Name*

Last Name*

Email*

Phone

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Related Posts You May Enjoy Reading:

@LeeOdden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing and editor of Online Marketing Blog. Cited for his expertise by The Economist, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he's the author of the book Optimize and presents internationally on integrated content, search, social media and influencer marketing. When not at conferences, consulting, or working with his talented team, he's likely on a beach somewhere doing absolutely nothing.

Comments

Lee, thanks for adding to the discussion – these are great thoughts and I have added a link to them on the original post on my blog. I like your idea of starting a wiki around this and will post about it soon to see if we can figure out as a group a better way to aggregating all of these smart thoughts into a single location.

Sounds great – I was actually thinking of adding it there, but unsure about the sensitivity of putting something like this which I would position as more about search marketing than PR into the New PR environment. If you think it fits I think it would be great to have a wiki environment there and I’m looking forward to receiving the password.

Hi Lee – sorry for the late request, but I realized there is a typo in my first name at the head of this article and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind fixing it as I’ve seen a few others linking to this article and copying and pasting my name from it … and feel free to delete this comment once you have a chance to update. Thanks!

Hi Lee, Thanks for the comprehensive summary and the SMO strategies. I do think one element that’s missing in this discussion is something that’s important to anything that’s social: Fun. I might be a bit late here but just blogged a possible 17th rule.

I just did an interview with Dom Vonarburg of AddThis.com bookmark and feed service and linked back to your post here with the comment that you currently rank #1 at Google for “Social Media Optimization.” Congrats on that and I love the great “Social Bookmark Creator” tool, which I just discovered in your other post.

One of the above comments mentioned Addthis. The service is OK, but I prefer Socialite because you can set it to post blog articles or websites to multiple social networks automatically instead of just one with addthis.

Probably the most amazing, or fascinating thing about SMO is that it is maturing as a result of social media – by important authorities in the SEO arena, such as Rohit, Lee and others jumping in to offer additional “rules” of the game. And I’m not even sure “maturing” is the right term to use, since it seems to be spreading like wildfire.

Just like the very media to which the practice is targeted, the actual rules and guidelines for SMO are being created through social media outlets – very interesting, indeed!

Very interesting points on Social Meia Optimization. In this day and age of online news and media, the exposure to news is pretty ovewhelming. Hence, please allow to me to add the 19th rule to the existng pack of SMO Rules, which is to Sensationalize the News you want to reach out to your different target audiences and stakeholders, by posting a link to news from your site or client’s site (as the case maybe), to the social media search engine sites.
We have successfully done this repeatedly to get immediate attention for important company news, by writing an eye catching title to the piece of information and keying in relevant search words in the search engines as well as sending the links out to relevant sites.

Very Interesting things coming out.
Great brain storming sessions and 15 rules of
Social Media Optimization.
Thanks for the Out put.
hope Some one start documenting the constructive work.
Lee Thanks for your contribution im looking for more transparency about best practices in SMO
The second version of Rule 16.
Maintaining the balance between SEO SMO

I have added something beneath your’s and other authors of these 17 rules. I don’t know whether it fits under the topic. Your’s and other author’s comments are always appreciated.

I won’t call it 18th rule but would like to add to the rule 11. Social Media is not only about a word straight from horse’s mouth but a word from all those who have experienced the subject which is being discussed. So keep your opinion accompanying your experience from which readers could and most importantly for FREE! If you could offer something more than free, it would work like toppings on ice-cream.

Need an example for “better than free”? Here you are, allow people to use the information from your site / blog for free and reward them with points for every referral which could be reimbursed by them to avail your product, service etc. Or reward them with something which they could utilize and add value.

I hope someone could come up with more creative idea than mine. I just want it to give it a kick start!

Here’s a relevant excerpt from an article posted at ojr.org, an online journalism website:

“Conference panels addressed the intersection of social media with marketing, movies, television, music, and, yes, the news. But as conference panelists expressed enthusiasm over this new era of public conversation, there remained few answers to questions about how news organizations ought to enlist social media to improve journalism… as well as their bottom lines.

“Follow the audience,” urged Vivian Schiller, vice president and general manager as NYTimes.com. “The more noise there is out there, the more need there will be for authoritative quality journalism.”

My response as it pertains to this article about SMO, is “follow the journalists.” My own SMO and online PR practices have been in part shaped by the massive info found at destinations such as pynter.org.

One of the things people tend to forget is that most of these social media sites have internal advertising campaigns. There is a good list of most of the big social media networks and their internal advertising campaigns here.

I think in large part creating viral marketing involves having a big existing presence in social media. You can’t expect users to link to something just because they think it is good and then expect all of their friends to link out and so forth. Although that might seem logical, how many other places on the internet are we actually seeing this (people used to say the same thing about SEO). Most successful Social MEdia Marketing campaigns I have seen strated with a fanbase to have a large initial seed for spreading links.

I think 14) and 15) are a little repetitive. Essentially it comes down to “Strategize and Execute intelligently with your goals in mind” – this can also be applied to any marketing method, not just social media.

I agree wholeheartedly with 16). Incorporating SMO in all web processes is so important. Whether it be SEO or SMO, applying band-aid solutions to existing content after the fact can create headaches, not to mention is an ineffective management of time and resources. I’m sure being a fellow SEO you’ve seen your share of sites where you thought, “If only they had applied this *before* creating the content…”

[…] I started reading an article on Rohit Bhargava’s Influential Interactive Marketing site about changing our approach to SEO, so that it works better with Social Networks. The original post has since been added to, and the finally summary of the 16 rules can be found on the Online Marketing Blog website. For me, this is very interesting as we were discussing at work the influence these networks will be having in the future, especially as they can really help to build brand awareness and loyalty, and as sites like Wikipedia start to lose their influence within search engines as their algorithms are updated and PageRanks recalculated. […]

[…] With all the buzz about social media optimization the past week, I thought it would be timely for us to present two updated tools for encouraging the sharing of and linking to content as well as distribution. These are concepts that are fundamental to the notion of social media optimization or SMO. […]

[…] Quellen: 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO) Rules of Social Media Optimization Introduction to Social Media Optimization Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO New Rules for Social Media Optimization […]

[…] 2. Offering Too Many Service Options We’ve been sticking to Search Engine Optimization, Blog Marketing and Online PR for the past few years and it’s working great! PPC, web design and usability are typically outsourced to partners or simply referred. While it’s important to keep abreast of trends and tactics, strategy should be consistent. It’s just the execution that changes as consumer use of the internet changes. Example: SEO and SMO. […]

[…] Some bloggers have been calling SMO (social media optimization) the next level of SEO, or SEO 2.0. SEO has grown out of it’s mainly technical roots and become more of a creative discipline. There will always be technical issues to solve though, since web sites and servers are technical things. It’s the creative and multi channel aspects of “pull marketing” that are defining the future of SEO. […]

[…] Rohit started the discussion with his 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO). Cameron Olthuis and Loren Baker have upped the rules to 13 with their respective posts Introduction to Social Media Optimization and Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO. Lee Odden added three more rules taking the count to 16 in his post New Rules for Social media Optimization. […]

Social marketing - the next edge in Internet marketing » Improve the Websays:

[…] As you can see from the graph above, Online Marketing Blog the number of RSS and RSS to email subscribers of this blog has grown substantially since we moved over to WordPress and updated the design. Participating in a little social media optimization hasn’t hurt either. One of the metrics we look at with client blogs as well as our own is the most popular RSS feed readers and aggregators used. This influences the RSS chicklets or buttons used to promote the feed. […]

[…] With all the hype surrounding social media optimization and social bookmarking’s impact on seo I have to admit, I was a little put off about the lack of relevent infomation to help marketers understand how to really connect with these emerging markets. […]

[…] Firstly, well done to Rohit Bhargava for initiating the 5 rules of Social Media Optimization and prefectly naming something we didnt realise we were doing. The list has increased from 5 to 17, excellently summarised by Lee Odden. […]

[…] 1. Prepare To Be Banned If used correctly social media can bring in great traffic to websites. Techcrunch noted that many startups receive a good portion of the traffic from StumbleUpon alone, and one entrepreneur even confirmed that the social browsing tool is responsible for 15% of his site’s traffic. Losing that kind of flow to your site can be seriously damaging. Social media sites have no problem with banning members who look suspicious. […]

[…] First think you need to know is what social media optimization is. Basically, it’s just getting exposure and traffic from social media sites like Digg, del.icio.us, MySpace and many others. For a more in depth explanation, check out the new rules for social media optimization. […]

[…] First think you need to know is what social media optimization is. Basically, it’s just getting exposure and traffic from social media sites like Digg, del.icio.us, MySpace and many others. For a more in depth explanation, check out the new rules for social media optimization. […]

[…] Reading Top Rank Blog we see a list of 16 or so items that are called ’social media optimization’ but this is exactly where we have the debate. These are normal traditional SEO tactics, hence why some of us at Yooter (I stress some) don’t believe in the concept of rebranding an old process a new name. But the process is still an old process. […]